Table
       

For once, tell us your troubles—
turn your wobbly legs upside down
like an animal at rest. Your frank surface,
weary of being both the anchor
or die wedge—Where love and hate
sit across from one another, unchallenged.
Make no mistake, this is where
the education happens. Even the straw
lips of brooms hug close, waiting
for scraps, fighting the dog for
our tender sorrows. (Flotsam can be grim.)
Salving wounds—blueprints made,
mugs clinked at a good deed. Pencils sharpened
for the party invites, or a calculation
or a sliver of a thought. Wishes blown
into bottles Bold a sound like tip-toeing
in die graveyard. Here we polish our
nails, to coyly hike hems for a date
that will get broken, or worse, forgotten.
Bones picked clean. We come to cut our teeth
on your pocketful of rings. All the dinner plates
rattle, testing their cracks with pathos
and glue. Listen to the echoed
noises of your life—Sturdy to hold a glass
half full of milk, our little miseries
newspaper worthy and too complex.
We are rapt like a quilt at your
secure location. Come now, pull up
a chair, be unburdened, rest here.

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Copyright © 2013 Cynthia Atkins All rights reserved
from In the Event of Full Disclosure
CW Books
Reprinted by Verse Daily® with permission